Reengineering

Reengineering is a 13-Letter Word, Again

Over the past five or six years, reengineering has taken a beating, especially in a public sector context. Reengineering got itself painted with the same brush as down-sizing and program review; which, is kind of like blaming the roller for the colour of your living room wall. Though well hated, and used for all the wrong reasons, reengineering is starting to make a well-deserved comeback. With the help of consultants, it has begun to call itself everything from transformation to UML, but it's process reengineering.

After a decade of reengineering, redesigning, right-sizing, and automating what can be left to reengineer? The answer has a lot to do with how all this reengineering was conducted in the first place. In selecting the processes for consideration, many organizations selected them based on organizational structure, either by accident or because that is the way they conceptualize their business.

For example, in selecting the "procurement" process or the "A/P" process the responsible manager finds a well-contained process that can be reengineered from beginning to end, without the nuisance of having to consult "stakeholders" outside of the branch being reengineered. Several of these reengineering projects have taken place over the past few years and they have yielded fine results.